ABINGDON, Va. — Virginia State Police now blame “human error” for the agency’s hiring of Austin Lee Edwards, the cop who killed the grandparents and mother of a 15-year-old California girl he “catfished” online.
“Human error resulted in an incomplete database query during Edwards’ hiring process,” Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in a news release Wednesday.
The statement amounts to an admission that the agency should have known about a 2016 incident, first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, in which Edwards was detained for psychiatric evaluation after threatening to kill his father and himself. According to an Abingdon police report obtained by the Times through a public records request, Edwards was taken into custody after he cut his hand and emergency medical technicians had to call police to help restrain him.
